who do they consider ‘homegrown radicals’? what rapidly evolving threat do they pose? and to whom?

homegrown radicals pose a threat to the agenda. Zbigniew Brzezinski fears the ‘massive global political awakening’:

Brzezinski said: “For the first time in history almost all of humanity is politically activated, politically conscious and politically interactive.”

“Authorities suspect Awlaki helped mastermind last year’s Christmas Day underwear bombing plot in Detroit, and a recent scheme to blow up cargo planes travelling from Yemen to Europe and the United States.”

The underwear bomber Abdulmutallab was able to board only with the help of an unidentified well dressed man seen at the boarding gate:

“Awlaki is believed to be in Yemen, but thanks to the Internet, his reach is global…”

“The ability to go into your basement, turn on your computer, find a site that has this kind of hatred spewed … they have an ability to take somebody who is perhaps just interested, perhaps just on the edge, and take them over to the other side,” he said.”

This is how the FCC got the Net Neutrality Passed, which just happened today:

“Turning to how terror suspects are tried, Holder said he still believes the “decision as to how people get prosecuted, where they get prosecuted, is an executive branch function. Even if those suspects are being held now at Guantanamo Bay. Holder said Congress should not be interfering with that.”

Internal CIA documents reveal a meticulous protocol that was far more brutal than Dick Cheney’s “dunk in the water”

Self-proclaimed waterboarding fan Dick Cheney called it a no-brainer in a 2006 radio interview: Terror suspects should get a “a dunk in the water.” But recently released internal documents reveal the controversial “enhanced interrogation” practice was far more brutal on detainees than Cheney’s description sounds, and was administered with meticulous cruelty.

Interrogators pumped detainees full of so much water that the CIA turned to a special saline solution to minimize the risk of death, the documents show. The agency used a gurney “specially designed” to tilt backwards at a perfect angle to maximize the water entering the prisoner’s nose and mouth, intensifying the sense of choking – and to be lifted upright quickly in the event that a prisoner stopped breathing.

The documents also lay out, in chilling detail, exactly what should occur in each two-hour waterboarding “session.” Interrogators were instructed to start pouring water right after a detainee exhaled, to ensure he inhaled water, not air, in his next breath. They could use their hands to “dam the runoff” and prevent water from spilling out of a detainee’s mouth. They were allowed six separate 40-second “applications” of liquid in each two-hour session – and could dump water over a detainee’s nose and mouth for a total of 12 minutes a day. Finally, to keep detainees alive even if they inhaled their own vomit during a session – a not-uncommon side effect of waterboarding – the prisoners were kept on a liquid diet. The agency recommended Ensure Plus.

“This is revolting and it is deeply disturbing,” said Dr. Scott Allen, co-director of the Center for Prisoner Health and Human Rights at Brown University who has reviewed all of the documents for Physicians for Human Rights. “The so-called science here is a total departure from any ethics or any legitimate purpose. They are saying, ‘This is how risky and harmful the procedure is, but we are still going to do it.’ It just sounds like lunacy,” he said. “This fine-tuning of torture is unethical, incompetent and a disgrace to medicine.” Full Story

Many detainees locked up at Guantanamo were innocent men swept up by U.S. forces unable to distinguish enemies from noncombatants, a former Bush administration official said Thursday.

“There are still innocent people there,” Lawrence B. Wilkerson, a Republican who was chief of staff to then-Secretary of State Colin Powell, told The Associated Press. “Some have been there six or seven years.”

Wilkerson, who first made the assertions in an Internet posting on Tuesday, told the AP he learned from briefings and by communicating with military commanders that the U.S. soon realized many Guantanamo detainees were innocent but nevertheless held them in hopes they could provide information for a “mosaic” of intelligence.

“It did not matter if a detainee were innocent. Indeed, because he lived in Afghanistan and was captured on or near the battle area, he must know something of importance,” Wilkerson wrote in the blog. He said intelligence analysts hoped to gather “sufficient information about a village, a region, or a group of individuals, that dots could be connected and terrorists or their plots could be identified.” Full Story

Did Media Ignore Autopsy Reports on Iraqi Prisoners?

Professor Peter Phillips reprimands mainstream media for underreporting autopsy reports released in 2006 that listed homicide as the cause of death for dozens of Iraqi and Afghani civilians held in U.S. military custody. “This is killing people; this is murder,” he says.

Lakhdar Boumediene was locked up at Guantanimo Bay prison for 7 1/2 years for a crime he didn’t commit and says he was tortured while he was there, including one episode where he was forced to go without sleep for 16 days straight. He cries because he doesn’t even know his own daughters anymore, and may sue the US government.

The Obama administration is considering a change in the law for the military commissions at the prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, that would clear the way for detainees facing the death penalty to plead guilty without a full trial.

The provision could permit military prosecutors to avoid airing the details of brutal interrogation techniques. It could also allow the five detainees who have been charged with the Sept. 11 attacks to achieve their stated goal of pleading guilty to gain what they have called martyrdom.

The proposal, in a draft of legislation that would be submitted to Congress, has not been publicly disclosed. It was circulated to officials under restrictions requiring secrecy. People who have read or been briefed on it said it had been presented to Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates by an administration task force on detention. Full Story

Just as President Barack Obama’s Middle East tour is starting, a scandal is brewing regarding photos of detainees being abused in Iraqi jails. The American Civil Liberties Union is pushing for a federal court appeal on the Obama administration’s decision not to release the pictures which, some reports claim, show sexually explicit acts, including rape.

In this interview with England I hear no remorse in her words. Rather she appears narcissistic and sociopathic.

She is one of the faces symbolizing the Iraq war. Pictures showing her abusing Iraqi detainees in Abu Graib prison brought her notorious fame throughout the world. In her first interview in three years Lynndie England talks about Abu Ghraib, about Charles Graner, about guilt, her current life – and the role of the Bush administration.

Mrs. England, a year ago you were released from jail after serving 521 days of a three-year sentence. How are you feeling now?

Not great but good.

What does that mean?

(She sighs) Oh, it’s just little things going wrong. I’m just trying to get by. Trying to find a job, trying to find a house. It’s been harder than I expected. I went to a couple of interviews, and I thought they went great. I wrote dozens of applications. Nothing came of it. I put in at Wal-Mart, at Staples. I’d do any job. But I never heard from them.

Do you think your name has anything to do with it?

I am starting to wonder if they realize who I am and they don’t want the publicity. I don’t want to lie. On my resume I have a brief little paragraph about what I did in the army and about being in prison and that I’m still on parole. I want to be totally honest. I have to find a job by September, that’s part of the parole regulations. If you break the rules, then they can bring you back. That would be a big deal because I don’t want to leave my son.

How do you get by? What do you live on?

We just got our taxes back. Thank God. Otherwise, I don’t know. I live in a trailer with my parents. My Dad works for the railway and he tries to help out with bills and my Mom helps me with what she gets.

You live in Ashby, a small town with a population of 1300. How do people treat you now?

They don’t treat me any different. I haven’t met a person yet that’s been negative to me. Not since I got home. Most of them back me up one hundred percent. They say, “What happened to you was wrong.” And some even say they would have done the same thing.

What do they mean by “They would have done the same thing”?

That they would have followed orders, just as I did in Abu Ghraib.

Why did you join the army at the age of 17 and against the express wishes of your mother?

I always wanted to be in the military. My whole life. I just didn’t know what branch – Navy, Army, Coast Guard, Marines, Air Force. I just wanted to serve my country and be a patriot, I guess. As a child I mainly grew up on military gung-ho movies so that’s where I got the idea. Old Chuck Norris movies, “Delta Force”, “Rambo”, “Missing in Action”, “Platoon”. Full Interview

In reversing himself and declaring that the US government will not release further photos in its possession of torture being practiced on captives held by the US military and the CIA, President Obama is sounding increasingly like the Bush/Cheney administration before him.

It may well be that, as Obama says, release of those photos could lead to anger in the Islamic world and perhaps to recruitment gains among groups like Al Qaeda that are attacking American troops in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere, but this is only true because at the same time, the Obama administration is opposing taking any legal action against the people who authorized and promoted that torture.

If the Obama administration were to open a full-scale legal investigation into torture, with an independent prosecutor assigned to go after anyone who violated the Geneva Conventions and the US Criminal Code outlawing torture and the authorization, condoning or covering-up of torture, quite the opposite would happen: people in the Islamic world would see that this nation was coming to terms with those who abused the law. The horrifying and sickening pictures would be seen as part of the process of exposing and punishing the crime of torture. Full Story

Dick Cheney says that torturing detainees has saved American lives. That claim is patently false. Cheney’s torture policy was directly responsible for the deaths of hundreds if not thousands of American servicemen and women.

Matthew Alexander was the senior military interrogator for the task force that tracked down Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the leader of Al Qaeda in Iraq and, at the time, a higher priority target than Osama bin Laden. Mr. Alexander has personally conducted hundreds of interrogations and supervised over a thousand of them.

“Torture does not save lives. Torture costs us lives,” Mr. Alexander said in an exclusive interview at Brave New Studios. “And the reason why is that our enemies use it, number one, as a recruiting tool…These same foreign fighters who came to Iraq to fight because of torture and abuse….literally cost us hundreds if not thousands of American lives.”

Mancow Waterboarded, Admits It’s Torture
“It is way worse than I thought it would be”
And so it went Friday morning when WLS radio host Erich “Mancow” Muller decided to subject himself to the controversial practice of waterboarding live on his show.

Mancow decided to tackle the divisive issue head on — actually it was head down, while restrained and reclining.

“I want to find out if it’s torture,” Mancow told his listeners Friday morning, adding that he hoped his on-air test would help prove that waterboarding did not, in fact, constitute torture.

The debate over whether waterboarding constitutes torture reached a fever pitch this week as re-ignited claims that Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) knew as early as 2002 about waterboarding techniques being used, and former Vice President Dick Cheney and President Barack Obama gave “dueling speeches” Thursday.

Listeners had the chance to decide whether Mancow himself or his co-host, Chicago radio personality Pat Cassidy, would undergo the interrogation method during the broadcast. The voters ultimately decided Mancow would be the one donning the soaked towel and shackles, and at about 8:40 a.m., he entered a small storage room next to his studio that was compared to a “dungeon” by Cassidy.

“The average person can take this for 14 seconds,” Marine Sergeant Clay South answered, adding, “He’s going to wiggle, he’s going to scream, he’s going to wish he never did this.”

With a Chicago Fire Department paramedic on hand, Mancow was placed on a 7-foot long table, his legs were elevated, and his feet were tied up.

Turns out the stunt wasn’t so funny. Witnesses said Muller thrashed on the table, and even instantly threw the toy cow he was holding as his emergency tool to signify when he wanted the experiment to stop. He only lasted 6 or 7 seconds.

“It is way worse than I thought it would be, and that’s no joke,”Mancow said, likening it to a time when he nearly drowned as a child. “It is such an odd feeling to have water poured down your nose with your head back…It was instantaneous…and I don’t want to say this: absolutely torture.”

“I wanted to prove it wasn’t torture,” Mancow said. “They cut off our heads, we put water on their face…I got voted to do this but I really thought ‘I’m going to laugh this off.’ ”

Last year, Vanity Fair writer Christopher Hitchens endured the same experiment — and came to a similar conclusion. The conservative writer said he found the treatment terrifying, and was haunted by it for months afterward.

“Well, then, if waterboarding does not constitute torture, then there is no such thing as torture,” Hitchens concluded in the article.

And if it’s bin Laden we’re concerned about, Fox News reported that he died in Dec. 2001:

Usama bin Laden has died a peaceful death due to an untreated lung complication, the Pakistan Observer reported, citing a Taliban leader who allegedly attended the funeral of the Al Qaeda leader.

“The Coalition troops are engaged in a mad search operation but they would never be able to fulfill their cherished goal of getting Usama alive or dead,” the source said.

Bin Laden, according to the source, was suffering from a serious lung complication and succumbed to the disease in mid-December, in the vicinity of the Tora Bora mountains. The source claimed that bin Laden was laid to rest honorably in his last abode and his grave was made as per his Wahabi belief.Rest of story

In a Nov. 2008 CBS interview Obama said: I think capturing or killing bin Laden is a critical aspect of stamping out al Qaeda. He is not just a symbol, he’s also the operational leader of an organization that is planning attacks against US targets.

A scant two months later Obama’s position weakened: My preference obviously would be to capture or kill him. But if we have so tightened the noose that he’s in a cave somewhere and can’t even communicate with his operatives, then we will meet our goal of protecting America.

Biden promises Obama Will “Send Him To Hell”

Obama Girl Helping Obama Find Osama bin Laden

Cheney said bin Laden was not involved in 911:

In this news clip, Cheney says his guess is that bin Laden is operating in an area that is very difficult to get to and that he’s not an effective leader at this stage because he cannot engage with his organization without coming out of whatever hole he’s hiding in.

According to Donald Rumsfield that ‘hole’ is equipped with computers and telephone systems – ‘a very sophisticated operation’.

In a press conference six months post 911, Bush was asked about bin Laden. Deep in my heart I know the man’s on the run if he’s alive at all.

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It is Our Responsibility to Examine and Change Society

The paradox of education is precisely this - that as one begins to become conscious, one begins to examine the society in which he is being educated. The purpose of education, finally, is to create in a person the ability to look at the world for himself, to make his own decisions, to say to himself this is black or this is white, to decide for himself whether there is a God in heaven or not. To ask questions of the universe, and then learn to live with those questions, is the way he achieves his own identity. But no society is really anxious to have that kind of person around. What societies really, ideally, want is a citizenry which will obey the rules of society. If a society succeeds in this, that society is about to perish. The obligation of anyone who thinks of himself as responsible is to examine society and try to change it and to fight it - at no matter what risk. -- James Baldwin